Posted in: AMC, Opinion, Review, TV, TV, Walking Dead | Tagged: amc, CRM, finale, opinion, Rick Grimes, season 2, walking dead, world beyond

The Walking Dead: WB Finale – Major Rick Grimes/CRM Clues & Theories

With Hope (Alexa Mansour), Iris (Aliyah Royale), Silas (Hal Cumpston), Elton's (Nicolas Cantu) journeys coming to an end on Sunday night (for some, that might be temporary), you could easily make the argument that the entire final episode of AMC's The Walking Dead: World Beyond was one big ball of connections to CRM & the upcoming Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) films that will have repercussions throughout the TWD universe. But instead of just printing a transcript of "The Last Light," we're sharing our thoughts on some of the bigger takeaways. So this is the point where I'm throwing on the "MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD!" sign and throwing down a spoiler image buffer because we have a lot to go over…

From questions about Silas's true intentions when we see him in full-on CRM gear to Hope continuing on in her father's footsteps, there is any number of things that we could red flag as major crossover intel goes. Let's kick things off with two major Rick Grimes references from Jadis (Pollyanna McIntosh). When Jadis goes to confront Elizabeth (Julia Ormond) before having her arrested, she explains to Elizabeth how she learned to survive by taking advantage of people & situations when they're at their lowest- referring to her deal to hand over Rick to CRM and calling him the "strongest person I've ever met." But it was during her face-off with Jennifer/Huck (Annet Mahendru) that we got some real clarity. Once again referring to her deal to trade Rick for a new life with CRM, Jadis says she "had an 'A'" in Rick but sold him as a "B" to keep him away from the experiments, saying, "I owed him that much."

"TWD: World Beyond" Finale Post-Credit Scene: Set in an abandoned biomedical laboratory in France (with "Les Mortes Sont Nes" = "The Dead Are Born" scrawled on the wall), we see a woman pull up a video message file from Dr. Jenner (Noah Emmerich's Dr. Edwin Jenner, who referenced his French cohorts during TWD Season 1 at the Atlanta CDC) off of an old hard drive. As she watches the video, a man smoking a cigarette shows up with a gun asking her if she's one of the doctors. She confirms that she is and that she's been on the run & hiding since everything went to hell.

Then things go to another level of conspiracy when the gunman asks the doctor if she's part of the "Primrose" team, but she denies it & confirms that she was part of the "Violet" team. She says she doesn't know where the Primrose team is and that they weren't there "when it happened." The gunman looks to "clarify" her wording by responding, "when you all did what you did." Apparently, the Primrose team was in Toledo, Ohio, for a conference when things took a permanent turn for the worse. She says that she was "hoping against hope" to find them there when she returned because "they were close" to apparently finding a cure.

The gunman clearly has a different perspective. "They [the doctors] should be dead. If they aren't and they somehow come back like you? We won't jail them like the others. We'll kill them. End this? You started this. All the teams. Then… you made it worse," he responds.  Now the implication here is that the gunman is speaking in some way on behalf of some authority that was empowered to imprison the scientists they're claiming here started the walker apocalypse and then made it worse. Or could this person be representing a group or body with a bigger interest in maintaining the status quo?

This might tie into what Dr. Jenner mentions in his video message about the "variant cohorts" his French counterparts had asked him about, those "nerve confusion" experiments he also mentions, and what we get in the final moments. The gunman kills the scientist and leaves, while the video of Dr. Jenner continues to play. We then watch as the scientist turns at a much quicker rate than we've seen in the past, and this walker type is more 28 Days Later than the lumbering type we've been used to (with a voice that sounds like a twisted mix of walker scream and the individual's voice). Is this the "made it worse" that the gunman was mentioning. It's quite possible that the "nerve confusion" experiments may have resulted in a newer and deadlier walker threat.

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